In a pilot study, she and her colleagues encouraged
depressed volunteers to recall positive memories inside an
fMRI scanner. Meanwhile, they watched a thermometer image
on a screen in front of them. When the amygdala was active,
the thermometer bar moved up. With practice, the volunteers
learned to make the red bar rise by thinking of their happy
memories. Learning to self-regulate their amygdala activity in
this way resulted in an improved mood (PLOS ONE, 2014).

There’s more to the treatment than just remembering
happier times, Young says. Simply asking people with
depression to recall positive memories can make mood worse.

The key, she says, is to recall those memories while bringing
the amygdala online. The amygdala interacts with a network
of brain regions involved in maintaining the prominence of
emotional stimuli, she explains. “We’re making these positive
memories salient to depressed individuals.”

Mind-body medicine

Before fMRI neurofeedback can be broadly useful, scientists
have a lot to learn about what psychological disorders look like
in the brain. Recording activity in individual brain regions is
an obvious place to start, but it’s only a first step, says Nicholas
Turk-Browne, PhD, a psychologist specializing in cognitive
neuroscience at Princeton University.

While the field of cognitive neuroscience has made a lot of
progress, it is just now graduating from studying individual
regions to exploring brain networks involved in a given
cognitive process. And instead of only measuring how active a
region is, scientists are beginning to uncover the actual content
— the so-called “neural representations” — stored in the
brain.

Recently, Turk-Browne and colleagues demonstrated
how such neural representations could be harnessed to train
attention. Participants viewed images of both scenes and faces,
and were instructed to focus on one category and ignore the
other. Unlike EEG, which generally only shows that a person is
paying attention to something, fMRI allowed the researchers to
identify which of the two categories each participant was tuning
into.

When participants clued into the correct stimuli, they
were rewarded with an easier task. When the brain scans
showed their minds wandering from the task at hand, it
automatically became more difficult. Participants learned to
focus their attention over sustained periods, performing better
on a follow-up test after one neurofeedback session (Nature
Neuroscience, 2015).

One day, this type of attention training could help treat
a number of problems, Turk-Browne says. People with
depression often ruminate on the negative, for instance. People
with social anxiety are hyper-aware of potential threats in the
environment. “Sustained attention deficits are a problem in
many mental health disorders,” he says.

Designing fMRI neurofeedback training tools based on

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